In March 2012, 23-year-old Maggie Goldenberger was in the middle of a six-month trip to India and the Philippines with her then-girlfriend. They were travelling from India’s southern tip and heading north for Rajasthan, stopping in at Internet cafes around once a week, for 15 to 30 minutes at a time, just to check in with family and friends.

At one such Internet pit stop, in Hampi, Karnataka, Goldenberger received a message from a friend in the U.S., who wanted to draw her attention to an image she’d spotted on Facebook.

It was a picture of Goldenberger when she was much younger, around 11 years old, wearing unfortunate pigtails, an ugly vest, and a grotesque expression: eyes wide, eyebrows pitched sharply skyward, chin drawn inward, mouth agape, and retainer-clad teeth bared like a hissing harpy or cat. In her hands, she proudly displayed three books from the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine, in their original 90s editions: Monster Blood III, It Came from Beneath the Sink!, and Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes.

The picture had been captioned, in characteristically thunderous Impact font:

ERMAHGERD GERSBERMS

“I had no idea at this point how widespread it was,” said Goldenberger, speaking recently with exactly the kind of composure and articulacy not associated with “Berks,” as the girl in the meme was popularly known.

Three years after first becoming an unwitting meme star, Goldenberger, who works as a nurse in Phoenix, still occasionally experiences the surreal, stupefying jolt of being ambushed by her own face online. “My eyes just get wide and I say, out loud, ‘This is so fucking weird.’ ”

Goldenberger’s friends delight in revealing her online identity to strangers at every opportunity. “Then there’ll be a 30-minute session of them looking at every single version of it. I have to fake-laugh as if I haven’t seen them all before,” said Goldenberger. “I just can't believe this is my 15 minutes of fame—I was hoping it would come in another form. But I guess you have to take what you can get.”

By the time Goldenberger glimpsed the meme for the first time, it had already gone viral, spawning into the multifarious mutations that outdo all but the most potent memes.

There are the ones with the original image plus new captions in “Ermahgerd” speech (“TWILERHT AINT GOT SHERT ON GERSBERMS,” “DIS WERS MAH FACE WEN AH READ DA SCURREH PERT”). Some used the same image with other objects Photoshopped into Goldenberger’s hands—everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd records (“ERMAHGERD LERNERD SKERNERD”) to instant mashed potatoes (“ERMAHGERD MERSHED PERDERDER”).

A whole subcategory of animal-reaction shots and expressions emerged: a pug reacting in amazement to a tennis ball (“ERMAHGERD TERNERSHBERL”), a cow (“ERMAHGERD MMMERRR”). Pictures of celebrities and others captured in awkward freeze-framed expressions got the Ermahgerd treatment too—practicing memesmiths pouncing. Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen has become a popular target, though no one can quite agree on the correct and proper spelling for “drergerns.”

The most consistently popular genre of Ermahgerdism, however, involved 11-year-old Goldenberger being transposed into different scenes and situations. Goldenberger’s face has been inserted into Jurassic Park (“ERMAHGERD VERLERCERERPTERS”), the Starbucks logo (“ERMAHGERD KERFER”), France (“ERMAHGERD THE ERFL TER”), wildlife photography (“ERMAHGERD BERBER HERPERPERTERMERS”), and onto the Kool-Aid Man (“ERR, YERRRRR!!”), just for starters. She has graced several Photoshopped movie posters, including for The Gerdferther, The Nertberk, and Blerk Swern.

The meme has had remarkable staying power, too. At the time of writing, meme database Know Your Meme has recorded 5 million views on its Ermahgerd entry and collected 340 distinct variations. It continues to cross-pollinate with other newer memes: one of the most recent variations, a version processed through the Google DeepDream filter (“ERMAHGERD THER ERCID ERS KERKERN ERN”), was entered in Know Your Meme’s gallery in July. Most significantly for the meme’s legacy, the term “ermahgerd” has long since transcended its origins and become firmly embedded in the vernacular of the Internet and beyond.

The whole phenomenon began, as so many do, on Reddit. Reddit user xWavy, a.k.a. Jeff Davis, started a thread called “Just a book owners smile [sic]” to share the image of Goldenberger, as yet uncaptioned. Davis was 16 years old at the time and living in Alberta, Canada, and says now, “I pretty much just found the picture randomly.” He had been browsing a publicly visible Facebook gallery of someone’s pictures. He doesn’t remember whose and didn’t know Goldenberger.

Davis was amused—and also slightly disturbed, he said—at the sight of the picture. A regular user of Reddit at the time, he casually decided to offer it up to the community and share the LOLs. “I didn't really think much of it at the time.”

One of the Reddit users who spotted Davis’s thread was a 33-year-old former fraud investigator turned systems analyst in Seattle. Immediately, inspiration struck.

“The level of excitement in her face, the braces, and the outfit just screamed awkward tween years,” said Reddit user plantlife, over e-mail. (He declined to have his real name mentioned in this story.) Inspired in part by the lisping Shelly from South Park, the voice “kind of popped into my head as the icing on the awkward cake.”

Plantlife stamped his text on the image—“GERSBERMS. MAH FRAVRIT BERKS”—and shared the meme as a comment in the original thread. Though the “Ermahgerd” bit was contributed separately later on by someone else and took on a life of its own, the meme’s distinctive language and essence originated here.

“Honestly, what do you do when you go viral for creating a meme?” plantlife said. “It hasn't really changed my life or anything. It’s not like I got any social-status upgrades, monetary benefits, or job offers out of it . . . I mean obviously I am pretty damned funny. If you can find me a good paying job as a comedy writer, let me know. I've got a lot of hilarious ideas in my head.”

Maggie, left, with a friend.

Courtesy of Maggie Goldenberger.

In 2012, Goosebumps author R.L. Stine was asked repeatedly for his thoughts on Ermahgerd. He seemed perplexed and annoyed, and worried that the meme was mocking his readers. In an interview that October for the National Book Festival he endured this exchange:

Interviewer: Do you know the meme ‘Ermahgerd’? It’s one of the most popular memes on the Internet this past year.
R.L. Stine: Yes. You’re the third person to ask me about it today.
Interviewer: Will you pose for a picture with me wearing this Ermahgerd wig?
R.L. Stine: No. No, I will not. I have to say, I don’t really understand what’s funny about it.
Interviewer: I don’t know, man, it’s just ‘Ermahgerd’!
R.L. Stine: Well I’m on Twitter and about five people a day say, ‘Have you seen this?’ I just don’t get it. I don’t get it.

Like other popular Internet-specific dialects, from LOLcats to Doge, Ermahgerd is a game in linguistics: in this case, the strangulation of almost every vowel sound into an “er.”

According to Ari Spool, a New York–based reporter and self-described meme scientist for Know Your Meme, rhotacized speech—that is, speech in which the “R” sound is somehow disfigured—tends to be amusing for English speakers.

But it’s not just about the imagined voice. “[It’s] also the absurdity, rhythm, and timbre of the words,” Spool said. “We call this type of voice-heavy meme writing ‘interior monologue captioning,’ and it’s a common ingredient in a successful image.”

Another factor of the picture’s appeal, even ignoring the caption, is its nostalgic resonance. Ermahgerd was a cognitive flashback for millennials—the most active demographic on the Internet—and their recollection of the 90s. It was the same time-capsule effect that, in 2005, contributed to the virality of a YouTube video of two siblings unwrapping a Nintendo 64 on Christmas Day—a home video that, Goldenberger thinks, was probably recorded within 12 months of the Ermahgerd picture being taken. (When evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 to refer to a self-replicating “unit of cultural transmission,” he was pleased with the word’s closeness to “memory.”)

None of this would matter, however, if the original picture hadn’t been such a compelling “found” slice of life. It captured the real, paroxysmal excitement of a little girl at precisely the right millisecond—the moment most unfortunate for her and most entertaining for us—to be rendered in Polaroid dye, scanned and preserved in pixels forever like a gargoyle of the Internet.

Except, as it turns out, not quite.

When Maggie Goldenberger was in fourth or fifth grade, she and her friends seriously got into playing dress-up. They would rummage through a dress-up box full of accessories owned by Goldenberger’s friend Kaelyn and devise outrageous outfits, inventing eccentric characters and snapping Polaroids of each other.

One of Goldenberger’s more memorable characters, which doubtless would have made a different kind of impression on the Internet, was her coonskin-cap-wearing “Pervy Dale.”

Goldenberger remembers the details of the very day that immortal photo was taken.

“I remember having a lot of fun picking out the items,” she said, “and Kaelyn running downstairs to pick out books.” Kaelyn had suggested that Goldenberger should hold the American Girl doll tie-in books, with their saccharine pastel covers of smiling tween girls. Crucially, it was the Goosebumps books, with their instantly recognizable hyper-colored cover images by illustrator Tim Jacobus, that made the cut.

Deciding against the coonskin cap, Goldenberger put on the vest, hoisted her hair up into intentionally dorky pigtails—she never wore them like that otherwise—brandished the chosen books, and pulled an intentionally hideous face for the camera. Normally, she hardly ever wore her retainer like she was supposed to, but it felt right for the character: she put it on for the shoot.

Kaelyn had the resulting Polaroid picture posted on her fridge door for many years. She also uploaded it to MySpace and Facebook, a treasure that remained hidden and undisturbed for several years before its glorious and spectacular excavation.

Ordinary people blessed by the meme gods react in different ways to their overnight Internet stardom. Some sense an opportunity and try to monetize their celebrity. Others hire lawyers and send letters pleading or demanding (usually fruitlessly) that the offending images be removed.

For her part, Goldenberger never felt unduly embarrassed about her sudden and unexpected celebrity. If the photo had been an authentic depiction of an authentic moment—an actual artifact from her awkward tween years—she may have felt different. To her, though, it was clearly fiction: just a picture of a kooky made-up character.

Speaking to Goldenberger now, it seems clear that she always felt that the Internet was laughing with her at the obviously ridiculous character she was playing—not at her.

“It was a middle schooler’s perspective of what funny is, so I’m always surprised when adults are such fans. It’s essentially making fun of a nerdy girl for being excited about books. . . . So what? I'm always baffled that it still comes up three years later.”

An online quest to identify “Berks,” however, did cause Goldenberger some distress: her real name started getting attached to the pictures, and an anonymous bounty hunter tracked down and uploaded a photo of her on a beach in Hawaii in a bikini. This second picture—it was actually of her this time, Goldenberger said, not a character—attracted some nasty comments. It was the only really hurtful episode of the experience.

“I have no idea who did that,” she said. “And if I'm going to have a bikini shot floating around on the Internet, I’d like to be spray tanned and under a waterfall somewhere.”

Goldenberger has, she freely admitted, derived some actual enjoyment from the meme. The one with her face on the hull of the Titanic (“ERMAHGERD ERCEBERG”) is one of her favorites. She also feels a kind of solidarity with the people—and animals—whose strikingly unbeautiful expressions get Ermagherdified.

Meme: Playoff beards, the grotesque forests of facial hair that for too long marred the faces of the Boston Red Sox. Presumed cause of death: Travel-sized guillotine, more colloquially known as a “razor.”

Meme: Playoff beards, the grotesque forests of facial hair that for too long marred the faces of the Boston Red Sox. Presumed cause of death: Travel-sized guillotine, more colloquially known as a “razor.”

Meme:The Obamacare Girl, the woman whose face appeared on the homepage of healthcare.gov and was, briefly, a smiling symbol of technological incompetence. __Presumed cause of death:__Obama-selected death panel, naturally.

Meme:Joe Biden holding muffins, a publicity stunt orchestrated by the office of the vice president to mark the reopening of the federal government following October’s eminently avoidable shutdown. Presumed cause of death: Diabetes.

BY JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP PHOTO.

Meme:Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin, a fantastical currency that looked as it it might just be able to prevent the debt-ceiling crisis. __Presumed cause of death:__Not enough people believed in it, so unlike Tinkerbell it died.

Meme:Anthony Weiner’s middle finger, the second-least offensive appendage he thrust into the spotlight in the past year. Presumed cause of death: Did not die, simply changed its name to *“El Dedo Chundo,”*which translates to “The Finger Loser.”

Meme:Ryan Fogle, the Colgate graduate who came in from the cold . . . and became a United States spy who was nabbed by Russians while wearing the world’s worst blonde wig. Presumed cause of death: Embarrassment.

Meme: Congressman Steve Cohen, Tennessee Democrat, winning America’s hearts by misusing Twitter just about every time he used it: he referred to Cyndi Lauper as “hot” and then deleted it; and he sent friendly public messages to a 24-year-old woman believed to be his mistress, whom he later revealed was not his mistresses but his secret daughter—who, naturally, ended up being a random woman that Cohen had once merely thought was his secret daughter. Presumed cause of death:“Steve Cohen” the meme might not even be dead! It might be secretly alive, or not even the right “Steve Cohen the meme”!

Meme:Tiny-Water-Gate, Marco Rubio’s State of the Union televised water binge. __Presumed cause of death:__Dehydration.